MOUGINS.- The Espace Culturel at the Place du Commandant Lamy in Mougins presents an exhibit of the works of art made by Bruno Lucchi. Bruno is a sculptor from the Italian Alps, who brings back to life eternal myths and questions with his own forms.

Born in 1951 at Levico Terme, in the region of the Trentino-Alto Adige, Bruno Lucchi is a discreet and determined artist whose creative universe has evolved steadfastly and in a reflected manner. His research has focused in particular on the imagination of the Mediterranean culture. Bruno Lucchi is a very active creator who has shared his vision of the world with the public during more than 150 personal exhibitions and 300 collective events.

Model natural matter
His characters have the elegance of mythic heroes and the strength of the Nomad nations. Their silhouettes are long and lightly draped, they carry their heads high. Their faces, with empty eyes, present a square morphology from which a strong charisma, a sort of trusting attitude of acceptance in face of the universe. Bruno Lucchi works with natural matter (clay, bronze, porcelain). The surfaces are non-finished and covered with horizontal lines that mark the passage of time, just like a rock that erodes. Everything seems obvious to the observer, and with out any brutality. Men and women, menhirs and spheroids, barely out of his oven, transport us elsewhere in time and space. Through a dialogue with the volumes, the sculptor personifies in the matter the ancestral questions man has always pondered.

Find our part of eternity
Nothing refers to the futile materialism of our time and nothing is looked at in a Manichean manner. When men and women are represented in couples, their individuality is expressed as much as the need of uniting that accompanies it. The bodies merge in the bronze or the clay, become one, while the entities continue to live on. Each piece becomes a model of witnesses accumulated throughout past civilizations, a concentrate of humanity. Our daily reality is transcended to become a part of eternity. As much as he is a sculptor, Lucchi here becomes a philosopher, recreating the perpetual relationship between man and nature.

Recast a mythology
Antique myths fill each of his creations. He set up a monumental Poseidon on the Costa Magica, the newborn of the Costa cruise line ships. But his vocabulary also resorts to the menhirs, the long mystery tinted stones, used as geographic points of reference or as sites for meetings of sacred cults. Or to steles, like the ones spread all over the Alps, the artist's fundamental inspiration site, throughout past millennia. The length of his figures takes us back to Gothic art, its hieratic quality brings to mind the large figures of the Egyptian civilization. Androgyny is a recurring theme in his work. Through the anxiety he creates he pushes us to question what the other is. The androgyne units what brings women and men together: he symbolizes in this manner the need of joint evolution, the indispensable empathy between the feminine principle and the masculine principle.